A Republican American story notes, “A
top Democratic lawmaker is sponsoring legislation to raise the state sales tax
from 6.35 percent to 6.85 percent to help cities and towns.”
The top Democrat lawmaker is, of course, President Pro Tem of the State Senate
Martin Looney, well positioned to sweep dedicated funds into the general fund,
the graveyard of noble Democrat intentions.
The grand sweep has become a Connecticut tradition. The
state failed to put money into its pension fund for state workers shortly after
the General Assembly broke a bottle over the bow of its pension plan. Funds
supposedly dumped into the pension fund found their way instead into the
general fund – for the first three decades of the pension basket’s existence.
The $127.7 billion hole in the fund ever since has served Democrats as a prime motivation
for increasing taxes. “The debt from
the public pensions,” the
Yankee
Institute reminds us,
“amounts to $35,721 per person in Connecticut, the second highest per capita debt in the nation behind Alaska.”
Excessive spending made possible by the sweeps and recurring tax increases are
rarely mentioned by Democrat gatekeepers in the General Assembly for the same
reason, one supposes, death is never mentioned in Emergency Care Units.
Looney is the most progressive legislator in Connecticut’s
General Assembly. Just now, progressivism is the cat’s meow among Democrat
legislators.
Prospective Democrat candidate for President Elizabeth
Warren, a Massachusetts senator, is panting heavily in the pack led by Vermont
Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist. But U.S. Senator Kamala Harris may have
vaulted close to the head of the socialist line when she announced the impending
demise of the insurance industry. What need have we of an insurance industry after
affordable insurance is made available to all? “Let’s eliminate all that,”
Harris has said.
In promoting his unaffordable Affordable Care Act, former
president Barack Obama memorably said, “If you like your insurance plan, you
can keep it.” Obama’s unaffordable Affordable Care Act always was a stalking horse
for a universal health care plan. Harris and the progressive cabal most
assuredly do not want you to keep the insurance plan you like. If we do away with
insurance altogether and replace the plan you like with universal health care
run by the undemocratic and unelected administrative state, we can “eliminate
all that” and leap happily into a future designed by the folks who have brought
you a monopolistic Post Office and a dicey healthcare-for-all-veterans plan,
both of which operate on the same administrative state model perfected by New
World socialist Hugo Chavez of panic-stricken Venezuela.
According to a story in the Hartford Courant, “How ‘Medicare for All’ hits home,”
members of Connecticut’s all Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation are a touch
ambivalent concerning Sanders' sweeping but honest plan to kill Connecticut’s
insurance industry with one stroke. Some of them prefer to dispatch the culprit
by means of a thousand cuts. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has made common cause
with the death-by-a-thousand-cuts group. This artful strategy is a bit less wearing
on politicians who hail from Connecticut, once known as the insurance capital
of the world.
Here is Murphy, “the author of one of the half dozen Medicare-for-all
proposals pending in Congress” on the proper way to dispatch the insurance
industry in Connecticut. According to the Courant story, “Murphy views his
proposal as an intermediate step on the way to a government run system – and could
lead to the ‘slow death of private insurance,’ while providing ‘a little bit
longer on-ramp to a single payer system.'”
Under Sanders' plan, the insurance industry in Connecticut
steps directly to the guillotine. The Murphy plan provides a few steps to
Connecticut’s imperiled insurance industry, possibly for reflection and
repentance. “I think,” Murphy tells us, “it’s better to allow private insurers
to compete against Medicare [For All]. I doubt that they can compete because
they will always have a need to charge a premium to repay investors and the
stock market, but let them figure that out.”
The truth is – and Murphy knows it – that the insurance
industry cannot compete with a national monopoly that defrays costs by furnishing the monopoly
tax dollars drawn from the pockets of Connecticut insurance workers who will be
unemployed once the progressives usher in their universal health care Trojan Horse.
In this nearly empty glass, Murphy, “among the top
20 recipients of insurance industry campaign contributions in the U.S. Senate,”
furnishes a drop of optimism. “Connecticut,” the Courant reminds us, “ranks
first nationally in the percentage of people working for insurance carriers.” However,
“Ending private insurance doesn’t necessarily mean insurance giants will fold.”
They will simply become insurance midgets.
And the drop of optimism in the near empty insurance carrier
glass? Says Murphy, the new insurance
overlord of Connecticut's still thriving insurance companies, “They could end up administering
all these new [DC fabricated) policies. They’d make a whole lot of less money
than they do today, but that’s probably not a bad thing for consumers.”
Right! As P. J. O’Rourke used to say, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.”
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